@NCSCgov's Threads

1/ #OTD IN COUNTERINTELLIGENCE & SECURITY HISTORY: On 21 Aug. 1776, the Continental Congress enacts the first law in America against espionage, authorizing the death penalty for the crime. The promulgation of this law was hastened by the continuing imprisonment of...

2/ Dr. Benjamin Church, chief physician of the Continental Army - and a British spy. There was no civilian espionage act and the provisions of military law did not provide a sufficiently strong incentive against committing the crime. Although Congress had actually added the...

3/ death penalty for espionage to the Articles of War in Nov. 1775, the law was not applied retroactively, leaving Church in jail. The new law read, in part that those who "shall be found lurking as spies...shall suffer death..." In Feb. 1778, Congress broadened the definition...

1/ #OTD IN COUNTERINTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY HISTORY: On July 17, 1950, Soviet spy Julius Rosenberg was arrested for espionage. The Army Security Agency and FBI had been cooperating in the decryption of intelligence messages -- a portion of which were collectively referred to...

2/ as "VENONA" -- exchanged by the Soviet KGB and GRU with their agents in the Western Hemisphere. Some of these messages incriminated Rosenberg, but this highly classified evidence could not and would not be used during his trial.

3/ Rosenberg's wife Ethel was arrested on Aug. 11, 1950 on suspicion of assisting him. Thanks to key testimony from David Greenglass, Ethel's brother, Julius Rosenberg was exposed as the central figure in a very active spy ring that was passing weapons technology information...

1/ #OTD IN COUNTERINTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY HISTORY – On July 9, 2010 -- after a multi-year investigation by the FBI and other elements of the US Intelligence Community -- ten deep-cover Russian “illegals” (operatives of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR)) were...

2/ exchanged in Vienna, Austria, for four individuals who had been jailed in Russia for alleged contact with Western intelligence agencies. The day before, the Russian illegals pleaded guilty in federal court in NYC to conspiring to serve as Russian agents in a case that...

3/ served as a chilling reminder that espionage on U.S. soil did not disappear with the end of the Cold War. The Russian govt. spent significant funds and many years training and deploying these “SVR illegals” to establish a presence in the U.S. and develop sources of info. ...